Francois-Xavier Briol recently received a 2016 Student Paper Award from the section on Bayesian statistical science of the American Statistical Association (ASA) for his paper on "Probabilistic Integration: A Role for Statisticians in Numerical Analysis?". This paper focuses on an emerging area of research called probabilistic numerics. It provides novel theoretical results guaranteeing good performance for a method called Bayesian Quadrature, and includes extensive empirical experiments in applications ranging from computer graphics to oil field simulation.

The paper originates from one of Francois-Xavier's OxWaSP mini-projects, and was written in collaboration with faculty from the University of Warwick, Chris Oates and Mark Girolami, and the University of Oxford, Michael Osborne and Dino Sejdinovic.

As part of the award, Francois-Xavier was invited to present the paper at this year's Joint Statistical Meeting in Chicago and attend the awards ceremony.